APRIL FOOLS AND JINKS ANYTIME

As the first anniversary of the Great Earthquake approached, Santa Rosans rediscovered their passion for elaborate practical jokes. The disaster interrupted the plotting and scheming of local pranksters, whose “jinks” the papers regularly used as page fillers. The stunt might be throwing straw dummies on railroad tracks or otherwise frightening people with phony corpses, slipping exploding cigars to their buddies, or, as told in the previous item, violently shaking the temporary police station so the officers feared another earthquake. Huh-yuk.

In the first item below, Daniel “Doc” Cozad and State Senator Walter Price were pranked on April Fools’ Day, although they really should have expected something; Cozad himself had quite the reputation as a practical joker, with a specialty in prank phone calls. Once a number of men showed up at the Press Democrat dressed in their Sunday best because they’d been told that the newspaper was rushing to put together a photo feature of prominent citizens.

There is a good April fool joke story going the rounds at the expense of Senator Price and “Doc” Cozad, and it is vouched for as an actual fact. These two citizens on April 1 were walking along a street in the northern part of town when the shrieks of a woman from within a nearby house attracted their attention. With “Doc” in the lead, both hearts beating gallantly and breasts afire with enthusiasm to perform a hero’s duty, they dashed up the steps leading to the house and two pairs of hands grasped the doorknob simultaneously. The door opened and before they could demand what bloodcurdling tragedy was being or was about to be enacted they were deluged with a baptism of water, and amid merry peals of laughter were reminded that they were “April fools.” Fire Chief Frank Muther got onto the joke and he has not been doing a thing to his friends, Price and Cozad since.

– Press Democrat, April 4, 1907

SMOKED LOADED CIGAR

Mike McNulty, the genial baggage-master at the Northwestern Pacific depot, who is known far and wide as “Mr. Harriman,” celebrated with the younger patriots in the City of Roses on the Fourth of July. McNulty’s celebration was not a voluntary celebrant and he was greatly chagrined at the appearance of Police Officer John M. Boyes on the scene just at the critical moment. McNulty had been presented with a cigar by Conductor Walter Holloway, the Havana being lightly “loaded” with powder. With a flash that caused McNulty to shout imprecations on the head of Holloway and to leap about seven feet in the air, the cigar exploded. Smoking is touchy subject with the railroad man since the Glorious Fourth.